Definition
A term from old English law with two distinct meanings preserved in historical legal dictionaries:
1. A privilege to hunt. In this sense, fugator denoted a right or liberty to pursue game, typically granted by royal or manorial authority. It appears in this usage in Blount's Fragmenta Antiquitatis and related compilations of archaic English legal terms.
2. A driver. In this sense, the term referred to a person who drives wagons or draft animals. The plural form fugatores carrucarum — drivers of wagons — appears in Fleta (lib. 2, c. 78), a late thirteenth-century English legal treatise, in the context of estate management and the duties of manorial servants.
The two meanings are unrelated in function, sharing only a Latin root. Neither meaning survives in modern legal usage.
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Common Confusion
The dual meaning of fugator creates a potential misreading in historical sources. A researcher encountering the term in a manorial context — particularly in records dealing with agricultural labor or estate administration — should apply the "driver" meaning. A researcher encountering it in records dealing with hunting rights, forest law, or grants of privilege should apply the "hunting right" meaning. The surrounding document type is the clearest guide. Do not assume the hunting-right sense is primary; both meanings appear with roughly equal frequency in the source dictionaries.
The Latin root fugare (to chase, to drive, to put to flight) connects both meanings, but conflating them in legal-historical analysis will produce errors.
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Why It Matters in Research
Fugator is an archaic Latin law term of limited but specific utility. Researchers will encounter it almost exclusively in:
- Medieval and early modern English manorial records, where fugatores carrucarum identifies a category of estate laborer with defined duties under customary law
- Compilations of hunting rights, forest law privileges, and grants made under old English land tenure systems
- Antiquarian legal glossaries, particularly Blount's Fragmenta Antiquitatis, which is a primary downstream source for the hunting-right sense
The term will not appear in modern statutes, cases, or secondary legal literature. Its research value is confined to Latin legal documents, manorial court rolls, and treatises from the thirteenth to seventeenth centuries.
Trap for researchers: Fleta, the treatise cited in every source dictionary for the "driver" sense, is a Latin text and its citations (lib. 2, c. 78) follow a chapter structure that varies across manuscript editions. Confirm which edition you are using before locating the passage.
The hunting-right sense connects fugator to the broader body of old English forest law and the complex taxonomy of hunting privileges — free warren, free chase, park, and forest — that structured access to game in medieval England. Researchers working on those systems should note that fugator in this sense is a lesser-documented privilege and may appear inconsistently in grant documents.
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Historical Dictionary Support
The four source dictionaries agree on both meanings and share near-identical language, all tracing to the same two authorities: Blount (for the hunting-right sense) and Fleta, lib. 2, c. 78 (for the driver sense). This uniform reliance on common upstream sources means the entries offer no independent verification — they are transmitting rather than corroborating.
Burrill's entry adds the Latin etymological note (from fugare) and a cross-reference to Curuca, a related manorial term, which is useful navigational intelligence that Black's and Bouvier's omit. Researchers working on manorial labor classifications should follow Burrill's cross-reference.
None of the dictionaries contextualize fugator within the broader systems it belongs to — forest law for the hunting-right sense, or manorial labor organization for the driver sense. Historical dictionaries here are entry points, not endpoints.
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Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Forest Law (Old English); Manorial System and Customary Tenure; Hunting Rights and Privileges in English Law.
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